


I think I love you, But what am I so Afraid of?

by bookworm213



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Ballet, Declarations Of Love, F/M, Happy Ending, Missions Gone Wrong, Mutual Pining, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), likely disregards Avengers: Infinity War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-12
Updated: 2019-01-12
Packaged: 2019-10-08 22:01:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,122
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17394485
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bookworm213/pseuds/bookworm213
Summary: Bucky is too afraid to admit to Natasha that he remembers their time together. When a mission goes wrong, he's forced to confront his feelings.





	I think I love you, But what am I so Afraid of?

**Author's Note:**

  * For [vextant](https://archiveofourown.org/users/vextant/gifts).



> Written for vextant for the Buckynat Secret Santa exchange 2018. The prompt they requested is the title! I hope you enjoy it! :)

The Opera house was crowded, a sold-out show, with the elegantly-dressed spectators hurrying to get to their seats before the ballet started. The excitement hung in the air like the sound of the orchestra performing the final tuning of their instruments. It was easy to see why: it wasn’t every day a ballet company as renowned as St. Petersburg’s made it’s way to perform in New York.

From his seat in one of the private balconies, Bucky tapped his metal fingers against the railing as he scanned the crowd below. These types of missions, being Fury’s peacekeepers, were easy enough if you kept focused. That was very much what Bucky wanted to do. After a few months of rehabilitation (and possibly creating his own goat farm) in Wakanda, he’d been given the all-clear by Shuri that any “HYDRA-instant-bad-guy-triggers” had been fully removed from his head and he was free of any of their control. It gave him a chance to maybe put his skills to use for some good for once. Besides, Bucky needed to keep busy. Some days it felt like when he wasn’t working, or working out, or watching shitty movies from the last 60 years, the bad memories kept threatening to drown him entirely. Work and keep focused: that was his new philosophy. It had worked so far.

But tonight he was having a bit more trouble than usual. 

Bucky’s earpiece crackled, and Natasha voice came over the com. “You’re tapping, I can hear it.”

Bucky’s fingers stopped as he felt himself choke slightly on his own spit. “Was not,” he mumbled.

“Will you relax, Barnes?” Natasha hummed. “Simple grab-and-go mission. Take the package before our friendly Russian mafia men can smuggle it out through the ballet, bring it back to Fury. Not like we haven’t done worse.”

Bucky ignored her last comment in favor of asking, “You just about ready?”

“Getting into costume now,” Natasha replied, and Bucky could hear the sounds of the other dancers rushing past her in their hurry to get behind the curtain. “I’ll be going silent once the show starts.”

Bucky chuckled. “I’m sure these mafia guys will be eager to take in the magic of Gisele before they drop off their package.”

“Once they see me dance, who couldn’t?” Bucky swore he could feel her smirking through the earpiece.

Bucky chuckled. “If it’s anything like I-“ 

He cut himself off, nearly biting his tongue in an attempt to stop that last word. Remember. He felt Natasha go quiet on the earpiece. He could sense her thinking, waiting, measuring.

Finally she said, “Curtain’s about to go up. You know what to do.”

“Right,” was all Bucky said before the earpiece went silent. Internally he was screaming at himself for slipping up like that. Working with Natasha for weeks, and he still hadn’t tried to tell her that he remembered their time together, all those decades ago. He’d tried, but whenever he’d come close to broaching the subject with her, images of his bullet going through her on the freeway, or her face as his hand wrapped around her throat effectively paralyzed his tongue. He sensed that Natasha probably already knew what he was refusing to tell her, but she kept it hidden well enough. He couldn’t bring himself to get past the shame of what he did to her.

Bucky was jolted out of his thoughts by the hush that fell over the audience as the curtain began to rise. Quickly, he scanned the crowd below him before the lights could fully dim. Yup, there were the thugs, just as Natasha had said. Sitting a couple rows down on the far right. Even from high up, Bucky could see the tell-tale weight of the guns in their pockets. Probably they bribed security to let them in with their cargo. He took a deep breath. Their job just got a whole lot harder: they needed to grab the package and take the men out without gunfire erupting into a crowded theater filled with innocent audience members. No problem.

The crowd cheered as the opening dancers glided onstage, their wide skirts twirling as they performed the opening number. Bucky scanned each of them, but he saw no sign of Natasha’s telltale red hair. The targets were still seated: the intel they’d received suggested that they would try to transport the package in between acts one and two. But even with the lights dimmed, Bucky could see one of the men had a medium-sized case by his feet, most likely the package they were here to collect. He could feel his body beginning to pulse with adrenaline, like it always did before a mission. 

He looked back towards the stage as the scene changed and the set pieces transformed into a dark forest. The dancers costumes had changed to long tulle skirts and etherial flowers crowns in order to symbolize fairies. The corps formed a half circle around the stage and the crowd murmured as the principal dancer glided into view. 

Like the other dancers, she wore a tulle skirt that fell to her ankles, but her face was obscured by a long veil. Even so, Bucky couldn’t fail to notice the bright auburn hair that was tied in an immaculate bun at the back of her head. His breath caught as she began to dance, her graceful arms extending upwards into the air as her slippered feet began to glide across the stage. 

The theatre was completely silent as Natasha did her routine: dancing as the heartbroken girl Giselle saving her lover from a group of murderous female spirits. She looked almost ghostly in her movements, her body nearly flying across the stage, in sync with the music as though it was apart of her very being.

It essentially was. It was how they taught her after all.

Suddenly the stage lights were up and murmuring had erupted across the theatre. Bucky looked down at the stage, startled, only to see that Natasha had abruptly left the stage. A quick look to his right confirmed his suspicions: the seats where the men were sitting were empty too.

“Shit!” Bucky cursed under his breath as he ran from his box and headed to the main floor. He had barely left the stairs when he heard the first gunshots from backstage and the theatre erupted into chaos. A surge of unexpected panic welled in his chest as he pushed through the fleeing crowd to get to the stage. Natasha was one of the best: there was no way she’d let a bunch of low-level Russian thugs get the drop on her so easily.

Two of the men were already on the ground by the time he got backstage. Natasha’s tutu was torn and bloody as she stood in front of the third man who held the case. In his other hand he had his pistol pointed at a group of terrified dancers cowering in a corner. 

Bucky jumped the man from behind, intending to take the weapon from him before knocking him out. Training took over as he rolled with the elbow the man gave to his gut as he grabbed the gun. But not before the man fired a single shot towards the dancers.

The next thing Bucky saw as the thug fell unconscious to the ground was Natasha in front of the frozen group of people, clutching her arm that was oozing blood. 

“Shit!” Bucky was immediately at her side, assessing how severe the wound was. “Are you-“

“I’m ok Barnes!” Natasha said fiercely, though her face was grimacing in pain. “Grab the case and lets get to the safe house! The cops are gonna show up any minute.”

They could already hear the sirens getting closer to the theatre. Bucky grabbed the case and reached down to help Natasha up. Her right hand clutched at her other arm to stop the flow of bleeding as they made their way out the back door of the stage. Luckily, the cops were easy to evade even when injured, and they found their way out of sight through dark alleys and shadows. The dancers who witnessed what happened were already paid off to let Natasha perform in the show; a few more wads of cash would guarantee their silence about tonight’s events. 

Still, the operation had gone much less smoothly than expected, and the only person Bucky could blame was himself. If he hadn’t been so distracted, if he’d grabbed that gun before the thug fired . . .

When they entered the safe house, Natasha gave a groan as she collapsed on the ratty couch. Bucky put down the case and hurried for the first-aid kit he knew was in the cabinet.

A few minuted later he knelt in front of her with some gauze and bandages. “Can I look?” He asked gently.

Natasha nodded, grimacing again as she took her hand from her wound. Her arm dripped blood, but it looked like it was a clean wound and the bullet hadn’t gotten lodged in the flesh. 

“I’m sorry, I should’ve capped that gun-“

“No.” Natasha shook her head. “Sometimes missions go south. I didn’t expect them to make a run for it so soon. Looks like our intel was off-base. It’s not your fault, Barnes.”

Bucky fell silent as he gently washed her arm in disinfectant before applying clean gauze and wrapping the it up tight. It would need a more thorough examination when they got back to base, but for now this would do. 

Natasha was quiet as he tended her wound. She didn’t even wince when he applied the disinfectant, her breaths coming steady and even. 

“You’re just as good at this as you were back then,” she said softly.

Bucky froze. 

“One time I was hurt during a sparring match. The girl nearly broke my hand in two. You came to me in my quarters after, even though you knew it was forbidden.You showed me how to patch it up so it would heal quickly. Without you, they would have left me in the woods alone to die.” Natasha looked into his eyes. “All these years and I still can’t dress a wound like you.”

Bucky did remember. How her face and body were covered in bruises and cuts. How he wrapped the bandages around her hand. How she’d begged him to stay with her even though if the guards discovered him missing he’d be killed. He had stayed with her, arms wrapped around her and his face buried in the scent of her hair until the sun rose.

“They put you right back into sparring matches the next day. I wanted to kill them.” Bucky whispered. 

“You do remember.” Natasha breathed.

Bucky looked up at her. “I remember everything Natalia. Everything about what happened between us. What we had. How they tore us apart. But I couldn’t . . . after what I did to you in Washington and Berlin I couldn’t . . . I was scared. Hell, I was terrified that you would hate me! Or that you wouldn’t look back on our time together the same way. I just . . . I guess I hoped you would say something first.“

Natasha brought her hands to frame his face, here eyes wide. “James you idiot!” And then she was laughing. “or I’m the idiot, because I was so unsure if you remembered I was waiting for you to say something! And it took me getting shot for both of us to finally grow up!”

And then Bucky was laughing too, and Natasha had pulled him into her arms. Her scent was exactly the same, and Bucky took a moment to inhale it before he brought his lips to hers. Their kiss was chaste by most standards, but it made Bucky nearly groan in pleasure.

“I’ve missed you, Natalia,” he whispered.

“Missed you too,” she whispered breathlessly as she went in for another kiss.

After a few more moments, they reluctantly pulled away. Natasha needed her arm looked at, and they both needed to drop off the case and be debriefed by Fury. Bucky had a feeling that explaining why the mission had not been as clean as anticipated was not going to be fun, but damn it all, he didn’t care.

“Maybe after this . . . we’ll go see the ballet together. Like . . . for real this time, no mission?” Bucky let the fingers of his left hand intertwine with Natasha’s.

Natasha grinned. “As long as I’m not the entertainment, you’d be surprised how much those slippers hurt when you haven’t danced for awhile.” 

Bucky laughed softly as he turned on the transmitter to radio Fury. He hoped it was a long time before anyone arrived to escort them back to base.


End file.
